“Why take her hands?” Gaudet said.
Murphy shrugged. “Maybe he thinks that without fingerprints we won’t be able to identify her. Or maybe he took them for souvenirs.”
“What about the cable tie?” Gaudet said.
“What about it?”
“Why did he leave it this time but not last time?”
The woman’s eyes were bulged and bloodshot. Her tongue was black and swollen and hanging from her mouth.
“Maybe she died before he could remove it,” Murphy said. “Maybe he forgot his pocket knife.”
Gaudet stomped his feet in frustration. “Two victims in two days. I’m telling you, this motherfucker is crazy.” He bent over and tapped his pen against the hard plastic cable tie. “Where do you get these things?”
“Wal-Mart, Home Depot. They come in all sizes. He probably picked up a pack at a hardware store.”
“And once he puts it on there’s no way to get it off.”
Murphy shook his head. “You have to cut it.”
“They probably realize that,” Gaudet said. “His victims, I mean. They probably know there’s no way to get that thing off, that they’re going to die.”
“Probably.”
“How long you figure it takes?”
Murphy stared at the dead woman’s face. “About a minute before she blacks out. Three or four until she’s dead.”
The woman was young, early twenties, Murphy guessed. Other than some dental issues, probably from smoking crack, she wasn’t bad looking. Just the one tattoo, “Johnny’s Girl,” in script across the front of her thigh. If she could have gotten off the pipe, she might have had a chance at a decent life.
Murphy stepped away and started walking the crime scene.
A few minutes later, he found a black skirt and a pair of “fuck me” pumps lying against one of the concrete pylons, ten yards from the body.
A three-foot length of rusted steel rod lay just a few feet from the skirt and sandals. If the piece of rebar the killer had used on the victim was the same length as the one near the pylon, it meant he had shoved two feet of steel inside the woman. If she had been alive when he did it, she would have bled a lot more. Thank God for small favors.